Put Laura's Law on ballot if supervisors spurn it again

In quick succession last month, two populous counties — Orange and San Francisco — moved decisively to enact Laura’s Law, a 12-year-old state measure that only one small Northern California county has fully adopted.

While voting to institute the mental-health law that targets mentally ill people who resist treatment, OC Supervisor Janet Nguyen observed, “We are sending a very strong message statewide.”

Just a few days later in San Francisco, Supervisor Mark Farrell, joined by Mayor Ed Lee, pledged that one of two things will happen this summer: A majority of Farrell’s fellow supervisors will adopt Laura’s Law or it will go on the fall ballot. Period.

In San Francisco, polls report more than a 70 percent public approval of court-ordered outpatient treatment for carefully referred mentally ill people with a history of hospitalization or incarceration.

Every county has a tragic example of why Laura’s Law isn’t a luxury but potentially a human survival tool.

At the urging of Supervisors Dave Roberts and Dianne Jacob, the county last year reviewed Laura’s Law, named for Laura Wilcox, a promising college student slain in Nevada County by a mentally ill man who refused treatment.

The supervisors appeared to buy the mental-health bureaucracy’s skeptical view that Laura’s Law is not ready for prime time. Funding issues. Not enough teeth. And so on.

So the supes passed on Laura’s Law and poured more money into the voluntary IHOT program.

In San Diego, resistance to Laura’s Law seems to be baked into the bureaucracy, perhaps a cultural opposition to court-ordered intervention, no matter how light-handed.

To be sure, Laura’s Law is not a miracle cure. Neither is it a Draconian scourge. It’s a tested method to give a small (but expensive) number of sick individuals resistant to treatment a chance before being left to rot in prisons or psychiatric hospitals.

In Nevada County and dozens of other states, the so-called “black robe effect,” the force behind Laura’s Law, has proved helpful in reducing arrests, hospitalizations, homelessness, suicides, violence.

A judge is not God, but in this troubled world, compassionate men and women wearing black robes and commanding teams of mental-health specialists are as close as we’re going to get.

In San Diego, it may take someone with the belief of San Francisco’s Farrell or OC Supervisor John Moorlach to either enact Laura’s Law or get it on the ballot where it would pass in a landslide.

OC and San Francisco, counties on opposite ends of the political spectrum, are sending a message.